This is the most unpredictably entertaining film you can watch this weekend
The highly anticipated sci-fi is stuffed with humour and originality, but it's a bit of a mess.
Mickey 17 is a film even weirder than you can anticipate, and that’s saying something given the hype around director Bong Joon Ho and lead star Robert Pattinson’s offbeat and highly anticipated teaming up.
This sci-fi’s bizarreness is actually one of its strongest qualities, given the glee with which the director leans into its madcap chaos and humour.
The other, undoubtedly, is Pattinson, who is insanely good in his contrasting role(s) of a lifetime.
Adapted by Parasite’s Bong Joon Ho from Edward Ashton’s Mickey7 novel, Twilight actor Pattinson is Mickey Barnes, a down-on-his-luck, rather pathetic guy who signs up to become an ‘expendable’ – a disposable clone worker – after getting into a sticky situation on Earth.
It’s the year 2054 and he’s headed to a distant ice planet as part of a human colony led by failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, giving his best Donald Trump-inspired performance around a terrifying set of fake teeth) and his cloying but devious wife Ylfa (Toni Collette).
A hallmark of Mickey’s job – we meet the 17th version – is his colleagues’ obsession with asking him what death is like, despite the cheerfully off-hand way with which they deal with several of his demises.
Mickey is essentially a human guinea pig, perfectly recreated each time he’s ‘printed’ out of a special machine that rebuilds him identically from waste organic matter, replanting all of his memories – from toxic radiation exposure to vomiting up blood after catching lethal virus.
